Month: January 2024

Featured articles

Georges Duchêne, “Government” (1849-50)

January 31, 2024 Shawn P. Wilbur
Six thousand years of government have proven abundantly that power is, by its nature, spendthrift, prodigal, unproductive, invasive, despotic. Experience does not seem decisive for certain intelligences; and we are in the necessity, — if we do not want to attempt a new dictatorship, — of combatting the idea of authority, not by its historical antecedents, but in its very principle.

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New Proudhon Library

P.-J. Proudhon, “The Political Capacity of the Working Classes” (1865)

January 22, 2024 Shawn P. Wilbur
[These draft translations are part of on ongoing effort to establish an edition of Proudhon’s works in English. They are very much a first step, as there are lots of decisions about how best to render the texts which can only be answered in the course of the translation process. It seems important to share the work as it is completed, even in rough form, but the drafts are not suitable for scholarly work or publication elsewhere in their present state. — Shawn P. Wilbur, translator] de la capacité politique des classes ouvrières par P.-J. PROUDHON PARIS E. DENTU, LIBRAIRE-ÉDITEUR […]
New Proudhon Library

P.-J. Proudhon, Economy (Ms. 2866) — selected translations

January 15, 2024 Shawn P. Wilbur
ECONOMY, PART II Psychology of the Collective Being, Its Faculties. Its Ideas. Its Judgments. Its Laws. Origins of Right. APHORISMS or PRINCIPLES OR REVOLUTIONARY RIGHT. […] [71] In all orders of ideas, we will see that the notions that direct the collective reason are not the same as those that direct individuals; that, unbeknownst to us, we have, so to speak, two minds and two languages, a mind for interest, speculation and individual [propre] justice, and a mind for general interest, synthetic philosophy and universal justice, quite different from the first; — a language for our individual ideas and a […]